View full sizeCOURTESY OF ABCTGreta Zehner and Michael Alexander star in ‘Our Town,’ which departs from tradition with a racially diverse cast and new scenes that deal with struggles for racial harmony, at the Anthony Bean Community Theater. The play opens on Friday. OUR TOWNWhat: Anthony Bean Community Theater adapts the classic Thornton Wilder play, with its slice-of-life portrayal of a small-town America, setting it in the early 1950s at the dawn of the civil rights movement and featuring a racially diverse cast. Features an added scene written by Anthony Bean, who also directs. Stars Charles Bosworth as the stage manager, Samantha Beaulieu and Courtney Green as Julia Gibbs, Derrick Deal as Dr. Frank Gibbs, Linda Aubert as Myrtle Webb, Scott Steckler as Mr. Webb, Greta Zehner as Emily Webb, and Michael Alexander as George Gibbs. When: Opens Friday. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m., through June 27. Where: Anthony Bean Community Theater, 1333 S. Carrollton Ave. Admission: $20 general, $18 students and seniors. Information: Visit anthonybeantheater.com or call 504.862.7529. Actor and director Anthony Bean grapples with an interesting dichotomy in his theater company’s new production of "Our Town," Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about life, death and existence.

Instead of setting the production in the early 20th century, Bean has transplanted it to the early 1950s, three years before the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, and cast black actors in half the roles, effectively making Grover’s Corners, the fictional village in New Hampshire where the classic play takes place, fully integrated before the height of the civil rights movement.

On the surface, this setting seems to present a utopian fantasy, which seems at odds with Wilder’s stark, no-frills tale about life’s pleasures and tragedies.

"This is a haven outside the moment of the ’50s," Bean said during a recent rehearsal of the play, which opens Friday and runs through June 27 at Anthony Bean Community Theater.

Bean’s idea for the play’s re-imagining started with one of his younger, white acting students, Greta Zehner, whom he envisioned playing the central role of Emily Webb, whom the play introduces in Act I as a girl and flashes forward to her wedding day in Act II. As the director of a mostly black theater company dealing with a play that traditionally has an all-white cast, Bean took the artistic license out of both necessity and innovation.

In Bean’s version of "Our Town," the main physician of Grover’s Corners is Dr. Frank Gibbs, a black man. His son, George, marries a white girl.

"He would never be able to do this outside of that town," said Derrick Deal, who plays Frank.

"Everyone lives in harmony," said Bean, who plans to set the tone before the show by playing John Lennon’s "Imagine" as the audience is seated. "It’s our job as artists to talk about a vision, talk about a dream — not just in terms of the way it is, but the way it should be."

However, Thornton’s "Our Town" is, above all, about the way things are, not as they should be.

Bean addresses this paradox with a scene he wrote and added to Act II. In it, George’s grandmother arrives on the eve of his wedding to Emily Webb and urges his parents to tell the young couple about the world beyond Grover’s Corners, a world full of prejudice, a world in which an interracial couple would be shunned and could even be killed simply for existing.

The scene takes the unaware citizens of Bean’s Grover’s Corners closer to the realm of reality and sets the tone for the third act’s meditation on the inevitability of death and inescapable folly of being alive.

The added scene "isn’t slapped in there just to stick it in," said Courtney Green, who understudies for the role of Mrs. Julia Gibbs. "Despite the fact that nobody sees color in Grover’s Corners, it’s something they’re going to have to deal with eventually."

Just as the residents of Bean’s Grover’s Corners will have to deal with the outside world, so will they have to face Thornton’s version of a final reckoning, in which the dead realize too late the preciousness of their brief, ultimately banal time on earth.

"It’s like ‘Seinfeld,’ " Green said. "It’s a play about nothing. It’s about living life."

Samantha Beaulieu, who is sharing the role of Mrs. Gibbs, said, "This was my first time studying the play, and there were several themes that resonated with me. One is that life changes gradually. It’s those ordinary moments that make up a life.

"Ironed dresses, and all the things we take for granted every day — we just don’t notice it."

"Our Town," a staple of educational, professional and community theater since it debuted on Broadway in 1938, often is remembered as an old-fashioned throwback about smalltown values. Its enduring appeal, however, lies in its deeper philosophical portrayal of life’s ordinary pleasures, disappointments, big events and tragedies. Bean’s contribution to the "Our Town" legacy may be to show that everyone — no matter their race — must embrace the urgency of living in the moment because it is all we have.

"I don’t see it as depressing," said Linda Aubert, who plays Myrtle Webb, Emily’s mother. "I see it as what is."